Kenneth M. Sayre (August 13, 1928 – October 6, 2022) was an American philosopher who spent most of his career at the University of Notre Dame (ND).
His early career was devoted mainly to philosophic applications of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and information theory.
Under the influence of Marvin Minsky and Oliver Selfridge at Lincoln Laboratory, Sayre became the first trained philosopher on record to become actively involved in the new field of artificial intelligence (AI).
The more promising approaches to automated handwriting recognition today have resulted from attempts to circumvent Sayre's Paradox.
Sayre learned information theory from ND's James Massey, winner of the 1988 Claude E. Shannon Award and an early collaborator in the PIAI handwriting recognition project.
[14] Early publications by Sayre in this area include "Pattern Recognition Mechanisms and St. Thomas' Theory of Abstraction," coauthored with Joseph Bobik in 1963, and "The Cybernetic Approach to the Philosophy of Mind: A Dialogue" with James Heffernan in 1980.
[17] Sayre taught numerous seminar and lecture courses in environmental philosophy during the decade prior to his retirement.
[19] In a period spanning almost 50 years, Sayre wrote five books and approximately two dozen shorter works on Plato.
[22] Sayre's second book, Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved (1983), argues that these views in fact are present in the Philebus but are expressed in terminology not frequently used by Aristotle.
[24] The book develops this theme with discussions of various early and middle dialogues, including the Meno, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Symposium, and the Republic.
[25] The latter three-quarters of the dialogue consists of consequences drawn from eight hypotheses about Unity, which commentators traditionally have paired in ways that make them appear contradictory.